Thousands upon thousands of us drive by the vacant Pirelli Building every day; its forlorn billboardy presence prompts wistfulness, curiosity and concern.

When will Marcel Breuer’s historic yet modernist creation be used for something more than to provide free advertising for its current owner, Ikea, to hawk its products?

…

Robert Grzywacz, the [New Haven Preservation Trust]’s second vice president, said Ikea officials “have no incentive to fix it up, which is unfortunate.”

This raises the troubling question of whether Ikea’s strategy might be “demolition by neglect” — allowing a building to be unused for so long that the owner finally says it can’t be saved.

That would be a convincing argument if it had any correlation to reality. When I interviewed the sales manager of IKEA New Haven and the public affairs rep for IKEA US in late 2008 for a piece about the Pirelli Building, both made it clear to me that it’s a white elephant they would love to sell. The historic status prevents demolition and IKEA has no interest in managing a rental property. They only bought it because no other parcel of land that large existed within New Haven for them to build upon.

The reasons why no one has purchased the Pirelli Building from IKEA aren’t conspiratorial. It’s a large structure, meaning a small company isn’t going to buy it, especially when office space is otherwise readily available. It has flaws, including asbestos, and seeing as it’s been empty since 1997, very likely lacks the internal infrastructure necessary for a modern business. A large company is better off building from scratch. Even in the mid-90s (when I lived in New Haven) the building was only partially occupied, suggesting the deterioration of the upper levels was well underway before it was completely abandoned. If the Pirelli Building is so attractive, why wasn’t it more fully occupied — or occupied at all — before IKEA purchased it in 2002? Why doesn’t Beach blame its decline on the previous owners?

Oh, right. Because the multinational corporation is the Snidely Whiplash in Beach’s preconceived story template.

The only possible futures I foresee for the Pirelli Building are either the city buying it to appease preservationists; or IKEA selling it at a loss to a developer just to get it off their hands. Until then, it’s preposterous to point fingers at the same people who are sustaining the building in the absence of any civic or commercial interest.

Pirelli Building. In my January article for Connecticut Magazine about historically designated but otherwise derelict buildings, I reported that passers-by of the Pirelli Building in New Haven could see “shattered windows and Venetian blinds askew.” I interviewed the sales manager of IKEA New Haven, which owns the building, for the piece so he knew it was in the works. It seems to have had an effect: Since then, the windows have been repaired and the blinds removed, making the building appear less forsaken.

Megafauna Extinctions. This story in SciAm has a good summary of the latest research to pinpoint when mammoths, mastodons, and other large American Pleistocene animals went extinct. It leans toward the overkill hypothesis at the end but I think the Clovis mystery just underscores the complication of the extinction question: not only are we not sure just when various species vanished (this much shallower article, for example, lumps them all together but it’s not clear if humans ever laid eyes on American lions or sabercats), but we really don’t know when the first immigrants arrived in the New World.

Compact Fluorescent Light Bulbs. I’ve been using CFLs throughout my house for over two years now and my love affair with them is devolving into spiteful asides and unflattering comparisons to previous partners. The biggest sore point is their unreliable lifespans. “CFL makers claim the bulbs have lifetimes of 10,000 hours each,” but I’ve had bulbs die in a matter of weeks. This may be an issue of poor QC rather than with the technology itself but it certainly offsets any savings accrued by buying more-expensive-yet-longer-lasting CFLs over incandescents. Not to mention that CFLs’ dim glow when first switched on in cold temperatures — and by “cold,” I mean 65° F or lower — often compels me to leave lights on in rooms I’m not occupying so I can see what the hey-hey I’m doing if I go back in there. A major criticism of incandescents is that they waste much of their energy on heat rather than light, but having experienced the alternative, I’m not sure it’s a waste after all.